there are people trying to kill us each and every day. Being blown apart in the sky--or living in a country that allows that to happen because we are too delicate to protect ourselves--is a much greater loss than simply being searched or safely scanned.

This is really much ado about nothing. If this is where the republicans are headed, they are going to make me sorry I voted for them.

Lucid: There are not people trying to kill us each and every day. I doubt if you travel much by air or you would be saddened to watch the spectacle, the useless and stupid spectacle, of old ladies and children and business women and men being subjected to this bullshit when the people, the TSA and the government know that they pose no, zero, danger. It is all theater, expensive Kabuki, so that people that do not travel can weigh in on how this is good for everybody, when it is clearly not. There is no common sense being applied here and it has reached the tipping point with this latest measure.

It is not a matter of privacy being invaded.It is not a matter of being illegally searched.

It is a matter of wasting time, money and dignity for something that is stupid on its face.

DO you have any clue how easy it is to kill people? Park a car bomb under a building, in a train, on a bus. To terrorize, just start shooting people. Go into a hospital and shoot all the babies. Blow up an elementary school. IT ISN'T HAPPENING!

I am coming around to the views of Diana Ross on this. Several years back she got all pissed off because a gate agent groped her breasts. At the time, I put it down to a celebrity hissy fit, but, on further reflection, what are the odds of Al Queda recruiting Hollywood celebrities to do their dirty work. I suppose someone will mention Cat Stevens, but I do not think that in the course of human events, any member of the Supremes or the Drifters will commandeer a plane. The same goes for Congressmen. Maureen Dowd had column complaining that Rep Boehner skipped the pat down at the airport....If I were a TSA agent and recognized Maureen Dowd, I would even let her through with a nod. The idea behind the inspection is to catch explose laden terrorists not give everyone an equally bad time. To be on the safe side, I would give Paul Krugman a full body cavity search, however.

Joe: You make the point exactly. A terrorist today does not need to sneak past the TSA with some crappy devise in his asshole. All he has to do is get in the security line at 7 on a Monday morning and set off the giant bomb in his rollaboard luggage. He does not need to buy a ticket. He does not have to deal with the TSA.

Obamacare was thousands of pages long.. most to take effect in 2012. The deficit has an unreal, monopoly money, other peoples money feel to it.. same with the bailouts.. nobody knows who's to blame Freddy and Fanny, Freddy or Fanny..

But when you are groped.. there is really not much to "analyse" or "digest". Someone other than a spouse, someone you probably never meet before, got their hands all over you in full view of the public.

There is no common sense being applied here and it has reached the tipping point with this latest measure.

Exactly. People thought the shoe thing was idiotic, but they put up with it because it didn't hurt anything except for getting your socks dirty. This is different. Some people don't care, some people don't fly, whatever. Once people at the airport start sliding into second base it's time to draw a line.

I can think of hundreds of ways to kill people or terrorize a population that don't involve hijacking or blowing up airplanes. So what?

The fact is, given recent, factual history, there are other people who do seek to blow up or hijack airplanes. Those are the target of TSA inspections. The other threats are, in theory at least, being monitored by other agencies, both here and abroad.

Just because we see a lot of bank robberies, it does not follow that arson or rape squads are superfluous.

As long as there are people demonstrating their willingness to blow up airplanes, then checks to prevent that are simply a fact of life. Get them to stop their attempts and security checks can ratchet down.

There are no constitutionally protected rights being violated here, only various people's senses of propriety.

The French airline pilots after the crash of Flight 800 off Fire Island, NY reported what they thought was a meteorite on a subsequent flight. There was a pilot who lobbied for the end of fuel dumping at altitude, a practice I had confirmed by Lufthansa. There are other areas of safety, inflight, that the industry should be concerned with, i.e., advanced flight recorders, less smoking flammable seat cushions, lithium batteries in cargo, fuel dumping, cargo inspection, never 100% I've just read for logistical reasons, and better air-traffic control, "around the corner" then the lumpy passengers. hey couldn't even get the location for the Flight 800 Memorial correct and now will have to be moved as sea and sand invade it they say.

I used to work weekend security at a university gymnasium and hands off was the rule, first: do no harm.

You make the point exactly. A terrorist today does not need to sneak past the TSA with some crappy devise in his asshole. All he has to do is get in the security line at 7 on a Monday morning and set off the giant bomb in his rollaboard luggage. He does not need to buy a ticket. He does not have to deal with the TSA.

Actually, the goal of terrorism is to terrorize, not simply kill.

So all Muhammad need do is be overheard by NSA planning to smuggle an IED in the vagina or anus and Americans will be terrorized by their own government.

Sorry, HDHouse, I don't buy that argument. Unreasonable searches have context. Simply flying doesn't mean you surrender ALL your freedoms; that's tyranny. Using your argument, the government could do anything they want to you in an airport. In the name of security, they expand that to any government building.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Wow, nothing in there about privacy. It's about stopping the government from doing what they are doing. The founding fathers were well acquainted of rights being stripped in the name of security.

That's an interesting statement to me because it's such a liberal sentiment... that the American government is treating individuals unreasonably. You could even go so far as to say that the American government is terrorizing its citizens-- not in the big-kaboom sort of way, but in the our own special perverted genital-touching sort of way.

I admire Ron Paul for making such a bold statement about this. I agree with every word of it. Too bad so many other Congresscritters won't think or speak boldly.

HDHOUSE: if you buy a ticket and get in line you pretty much have surrendered your expectation of privacy

You may have surrendered your expectation of privacy. But I haven't surrendered mine. Just because the TSA asserts the right to do this doesn't mean we have to let them.

Americans used to have the right to travel freely without harassment around our own country. Ron Paul is right. We gave that up because our elected officials (and many citizens) panicked after 9-11. Now people are beginning to realize that there are some things worth fighting for and stopping TSA workers from putting their hands in your daughter's panties is surely one of them.

Well fear has been a popular commodity these days sold well and hard by the Republican Party these last eight years, and Michael Chertoff, was ubiquitous on TV with his warnings that the nation needed better security, and lo and behold his Raapaiscan company has the order for these full body and the needed body gropes to encourage folks to submit to them. But I am hearten to read folks now realize our two wars will not make us any safer than this theatrical act from the TSA is just as futile, although I think that they should be part of the security mix--

Julius:Of course if this was done under the Bush admin you would hear very little outrage from the Right.

Kinda like the way the left raised holy hell about the nebulous supposed violations of privacy via wiretaps and data mining, which is based on an interpretation of the Fourth Amendment... but are willing to defend it being literally violated thousands of times a day by the TSA?

H D House: I have never seen you before, but I can guarantee you that were I to lay eyes on you I would know immediately that you are not a terrorist. Ditto your wife. Ditto your children and grandchildren. I guarantee you I can let you through security without the slightest worry. To waste resources on you and your family is to deny resources to more likely suspects. We need to adopt some version of a modified screening for obviously nonthreatening individuals and subject a smaller group of people to the indignity of the full screenings. In time we can have a system where frequent fliers can be given extensive background checks etc. We cannot continue on the path of doing something as idiotic as what we are now doing.

George W. Bush, for the record, is the evil genius behind the initiation of this Kabuki so any talk about conservatives not raising hell is being made by someone not knowing what they are talking about. Bush's idiot Mineta (sic?) made the point that it was better to have the entire country suffer rather than offend a few thousand muslims because Mineta's family had been sent to internment camps during the second world war. It seems that coincidentally the Japanese had attacked the United States.

Imagine if the police dept. operated like the TSA. Oh right... they can't. We have 4th amendment rights. They have to actually have probable cause to search us. Meaning if they are looking for a rapist, they don't detain and question women.

They are forced to be discriminating (a dirty word to the progressive folk- like profiling). Which is a good thing. If the police did not use profiling as part of their investigations, but instead randomly detained people for questioning, they'd be as ineffective as the TSA.

Fen: The TSA never groped us under Bush but the whole stupid apparatus was put in place by Mineta. The entire concept of every single solitary person being a potential threat was conceived by Mineta and permitted by Bush. I am a Bush fan, but he could have nipped this shit in the bud with some profiling and some common sense.

In any large city, or mall, or place where lots of people gather, you can be the victim of a terrorist attack. Wouldn't we all be safer if the police, or the TSA, had the right to randomly search anyone at any time, since gosh darn it, the govt. thinks anyone can be a terrorist?

In the name of safety, how many will give up their 4th amendment rights to enter a mall? Their place of work? Their kid's school? A courthouse- ie: while serving jury duty? A gas station? A theater? etc. etc.

Back before Pres. Reagan, when there was a general exam, PACE, for potential government employees (now the acronym for a standard exam for paralegals in the US) I once interviewed at JFK for a US Customs inspection job, scoring high on the test. I was asked, if you opened a suitcase of a friend who was in law school, and there were two marijuana cigarettes in plain view, what would you do, knowing he/she would never be able to practice law if arrested. I thought someone so "stupid" shouldn't be in law. I never heard from the "paramilitary" organization they claimed to be, but as I recall a suitcase in a luggage transporter was reported to explode three day later. I also did not decide to take the food stamp pickup job. The exam was perhaps, thought to be discriminatory, and each federal department after, were to set their own hiring requirements, points added for veterans. An amendment, by the way for veterans was added to the NY State Constitution in the prior general election as a confusing option on the old voting machines, an option only a state convention I thought would create. Do we have two (or 3) competing "paramilitary" organizations at our airports now? Money should perhaps be better spent in new "spiffy" luggage screening.

Lucid, you outlined several attempts which didn't originate domestically and failed due to chance. Not one of these attempts would have been detected by the scanners you love so much (don't take my word for it; the makers of the devices said so.)

Yet, the shoe bomber, Christmas bomber and 9/11 hijackers would have ALL likely been detected using common sense, plain old police work and profiling.

Incidentally, if the "strategy of 1000 cuts" was an actually strategy, where are all the cuts? How many civilian American deaths have resulted from terrorist action since 9/12?

The real irony is that your paranoia has actually done more damage to our civil liberties and to this country than direct action by terrorists.

To me, the problem with all this is that if you have something like the underwear bomber, you should look at the failures that allowed him to get as far as he got in the first place and FIX THOSE. If we just fix those procedures, we could avoid a lot of problems.

The Israelis have 60,000 air passengers a day; we have more than 600,000.

Israel is a smaller counter. They also have fewer airports. I don't get this argument.

"Do you really think that is a realistic solution for the US and the rest of the world?"

You're arguing against the El Al system, a system that has proven effective, because you think it is unrealistic? How is it unrealistic? Train and hire as many interviewers as are needed to keep the lines as short as possible. People will be inconvenienced? So what? They already are.

Is it also unrealistic to expect all checked luggage to be scanned? Is that too time consuming and expensive?

"The real solution is for people to go through the scanners, which are safe and quick."

The ratio of Israeli to American air travelers surprises me. I would have thought it would be 1:50 as is the population (you have it as 1:10). In either case, the answer is easy (and, it's easier if your numbers are correct): hire guards in proportion to the population you need to guard! And, if you are using your guards _efficiently_, by having them devote the psy-ops time in proportion to the individual threat level, you can even save money (and everyone's time).

if you have flown into Israel, you know it takes HOURS to get through the Isreali system. It is one thing to spend hours in security if you are getting on a 12 hour flight. It is quite another if you are flying a 40 minute shuttle flight from NY to DC.

also, Israel has a tradition of security that informs its airport security agents. do you really want the tsa doing that kind of nuanced judging on a routine, day-in-day-out basis?

if you have flown into Israel, you know it takes HOURS to get through the Isreali system. It is one thing to spend hours in security if you are getting on a 12 hour flight. It is quite another if you are flying a 40 minute shuttle flight from NY to DC.

If it is too inconvenient, then drive. Why should I substitute my and my families increased safety for your convenience?

The other option, is let airlines choose their level of security. And then you can fly on the scan and grope airline and "feel" safer. And I can fly on the profiling airline, and "be" safer.

Exactly right. And in wartime you have to expect some hits now and then. You think going into battle General Patton didn't expect to take some casualties? There's no such thing as perfect security, especially in a war. Yet the TSA would happily turn us into another East Germany in its never ending quest for that which is unattainable anyway.

We have done pretty good since 9-11 with metal detectors and light pat downs. That was good enough for me. To tell the truth, I'm far less worried about terrorists than I am about drunk divers, teenage who text behind the steering wheel and, most of all, people who put so much emphasis on safety they forget about freedom and dignity.

I would have more confidence in the TSA if I had more confidence in Barack Obama. Unfortunately, President Obama does not inspire any confidence on matters of security.

He imputed racist motives to the Cambridge PD without knowing anything about the situation. His administration’s efforts to prosecute terrorists in civilian courts are a joke. Obamacare’s threat to our country’s economic security frightens me. He doesn’t even know what a marine corpsman is.

He chalked up recent election losses to poor messaging. The conclusion is that he cares about superficial things that make people feel good. This is not someone who understands what security means.

As a New York Times guest columnist observed today, what the TSA doesn't isn't so much security as security theater. Otherwise they wouldn't have initially decided that made pilots had be screened too. If a pilot wanted to kill everyone on board he wouldn't need a gun or bomb. He'd just push the nose over 10 seconds before touchdown.

As long as Barack Obama is the putative President then there is no constitution and no law. He is violating the most basic security firewall securing our liberty. Can there be any doubt that he neither has the attachment nor the allegiance to this country and it's values, required to be POTUS.

Obama is clearly NOT an eligible A2S1C5 natural born Citizen, as his father was not a US Citizen when Obama 2 was born. NO MATTER if he was born IN the White House. He knows it and many members of Congress know it. They are all committing treason.This case was in conference yesterday:

I guess it's not important to professor Althouse that there is a case in conference in the SCOTUS about the President's very eligibility to hold the office!!

Don't you all understand that these are the actions of a rogue government, adherent to no law, and is a big middle finger to We the People. They dare us to do something about it!

The 25th Amendment provides for the replacement of an ineligible president, and it is the last firewall.

Or we can talk about DWTS, or Wisconson football, or walks in the woods, or little birdies. But hey look at those North Korean bombs, and wow that may have been a Chinese rocket, but our government refuses to tell We the People if it was or not!

Other governments know of his ineligibilty also. This is a grave situation of breach of our national security.

lucid: you don't fly a lot, or at least a lot relative to frequent fliers. I am on at least two planes a week usually four, sometimes six. I am not in the least bit afraid of terrorists blowing up a plane. You should chill or at least learn to read. There should be security, but that does not mean that every man woman and child has to be viewed as an equal threat. If you do believe that then I call bullshit on your flying a lot.

Lucid wrote:This is really much ado about nothing. If this is where the republicans are headed, they are going to make me sorry I voted for them.

And of course, just let someone get through after we start "profiling" and the same people are going to demand even more screening at airports to show they are tough on security. They'll say, we're not profiling the right thing, too many innocent people will get caught in the profling net, and be subjected to even WORSE abuses who didnt do anything. Muslims who aren't guilty, but were profiled will sue the govt for unlawful searches and seizurs and sexual assault.

Ron Paul will say any loss of personal freedom in the guise of more security means you'll get neither (obvlivious to the fact that that applies to Muslim americans or anyone caught in the profiling net), so that's all the security you're going to get at airports, and then give up the notion that they are serious about fighting war on terror.

@michael--you consistently argue against things that no one has said. no one views every person as a threat. security defers attacks. the inconvenience is minor compared to what will happen if/when a plane explodes in the sky. then we'll see how long it will take to get on a flight--not to mention what it will do to the economy.

i call bullshit on your arguing with straw men. and whether you fly more or less than someone else is not an argument about security--it's an argument about your self-importance.

HD House wrote:don't tell me what you won't do. tell me what you will do.

thanks for calling me a genius by the way. much appreciated. i know how hard that was for you.

I think the libertarians are being complete crybabies and hypocrites about this (since until Obama took office they Rush and Hannity were the ones saying the libs wern't serious about the War on Terror and criticisizing any lberal that questioned them pushing the TSA and Patriot Act upon us under the guise of fighting the war on terror - and in fact many lberals were arguing "if you give up your personal liberty for the notion of defense you'll get neither")Yet, the libs are also the hypocrites here too, because notice how they all fall in lockstep with Obama and now as thoughtul questions about what would you do to deal with terrorist threats as if they are now serious about fighting it.Because if you would fall behind Obama saying we should be able to put people through scanners why would you have an issue with say the govt checking library books or why would everytime a thraet was issued the liberals would say it was simply scare tactics by the Bush administration.I'll admit that there is some schaudenfreude that suddenly the libs are being hoisted on their own petard and now justifying excesses as extreme as Bush's in an effort to be serious about dealing with threats. THey made their beds and now have to lie in it. When you are unserious about a threat and then have to deal with it seriously you look like a hypocrite.Only conservatives and libertarians are now making their own beds and should be prepared to lie in it too. If we do away with scans at airports and soeone gets on a plane that could have been stopped by a simple scanning I don't want to hear Hannity or Rush say we need to get serious about stopping threats at airports. If we go the profiling route and innocent people get profiled and have to strip down (like the innocent female professor in Israel who had to show them her tits) or get yelled at by security I don't want to hear about how libertarians don't like people treading on them, since they are more than happy to let govt tread on those who get snared in the profiling net whether they are guilty or innocent.

Or lets go the Cedarford, Alex route and kick all muslims out of the country and put them in concentration camps (even I guess if they are Muslim americans) , and set up Fortress America and block all air traffic from certain countries. Not even Israel goes that far. And then tell me again how libertarians are for govt not interfering with peoples lives and how giving up fundamental liberties for some security will give you neither.

Joe wrote:No it doesn't. I've flown in and out of Israel and it didn't take that long at all. (It took longer to get out of France!)

Your attitude is nothing short of bizarre. Israel has a proven system, yet you reject it in its entirely for a system which is stated by its own manufacturer to not work. It's stunning.

Everyone knows that if you are a Jew and go through security at EL AL that you get different treatment than if you are a non jew. THey say come to the airport three hours early which is a lot longer than going through an airport here. But don't simply count the security line. THey start checking you while youre still in the car on the way to the airport.But anyway, everyone knows that if you speak Hebrew to the guards that that's the way you can bypass a lot of security time. In effect if you speak Jewish you are Joe Biden and the fat cats who get to get whisked through the security lines, while the lesser folks get stuck opening every bag more than once and getting reamed by El Al security. So, why are people complaining that Joe Biden and the fat cats are not having to be scanned? You want to be the fat cats, and let those other people be scanned, so long as it doesn't inconvenience you. Which is all well and good unless you are that other person.And makes you look like a hypocrite. Give us really lax security, like Joe Biden and make muslims or people who don't have the secret handshake empty their bags and submit to pat downs. I'm special!

and criticisizing any lberal that questioned them pushing the TSA and Patriot Act upon us under the guise of fighting the war on terror - and in fact many lberals were arguing "if you give up your personal liberty for the notion of defense you'll get neither")

1. The "Republicans" did not push the TSA on anyone.National Homeland Security and Combating Terrorism Act of 2002 (S.2452) was written by Joe Lieberman, and co-sponsored by Dick Durbin, Max Cleland, and Harry Reid.

2. if you give up your personal liberty for the notion of defense you'll get neither

Is idiotic in context of the way the left was shouting it.

Also note: the left no longer shouts this despite the fact the sort of a god president is doing wiretapping & argues for indefinite detentions in court.

Jay wrote:Also note: the left no longer shouts this despite the fact the sort of a god president is doing wiretapping & argues for indefinite detentions in court.

Right, Obama is doing all the things that Bush did because those turn out to be sensible suggestions and because to not do those things when you're president would be negligent. So they're hypocrites, granted. But the right is going down that exact same road, suggesting that suddenly they are against intrusive searches and don't want to tread on peoples rights and any loss of liberty in the guise of freedom gives you neither. Considering it was the right and libertarians arguing for WARRANTLESS wiretaps and indefinite detentions (in other words treating the war against Al Qaeda as an actual war) it's kind of funny to hear libertarians argue that? Really? But if you think that scanning for weapons that are about to get on a plane goes too far and is a loss of your fundamental liberties, don't say you are serious about fighting a war on terror, and dont tell those who didn't want to allow bush to use warrantless wiretaps that they aren't serious. Neither are the libertarians/conservatives.

Youll notice that all of a sudden it's the libertarians/conservatives arguing how there really isn't a terrorist threat. Certainly not one serious enough to warrant them going through any enhanced security at airports. So then why give the govt the right to setup wireless wiretaps?

"As the United States defends against the ever expanding threat of Muslim terror, right here on our home turf, success depends on throwing off the shackles of political correctness and adopting the methods of our ally Israel."

Michael to Fen: The TSA never groped us under Bush but the whole stupid apparatus was put in place by Mineta. The entire concept of every single solitary person being a potential threat was conceived by Mineta and permitted by Bush. I am a Bush fan, but he could have nipped this shit in the bud with some profiling and some common sense.

YES.

Under Bush, we had to take off our shoes and dump our drinks, which is just as useless as the naked scanners even if the scanners and patdowns are more intrusive. The scanners and patdowns wouldn't be possible without the rules about shoes and liquids. Those of you who think the conservatives didn't complain about TSA under Bush weren't paying attention. It is true that we should have expressed much more outrage.

No matter who thought of it or who was president when, the TSA is a bad idea implemented poorly and it should be dismantled. Period.

lucid: the very point of most frequent flier's trouble with the TSA is that its premise is flawed: it searches for weapons and not for terrorists. You would have to be frequently in airports to observe that the cohorts there are the identical cohorts you will see in any major shopping mall or on any major street. It is preposterous to assume that all of those people are suspects. The TSA behaves like a police department questioning women as potential rapists. Might make things more "fair" but it is stupid on its face. If you don't travel then this is just an abstraction, a political argument without consequence.

The current new policies are driving people away from flying. The result is less tourism, less money spent in hotels, restaurants, at rental car companies. It is less businessmen meeting to advance their efforts, less people being hired.

But you don't give a shit about any of that because you are not willing to profile and you are not willing to admit that it is expensive theater.

jr565: No one is arguing there is no terrorist threat. The intelligent are arguing that the TSA should look for terrorists instead of going through old ladies' hand bags. Try very hard to see that there is a distinction with a difference here. Your retort, of course, is that the grandma COULD be hiding a weapon she would use to further the jihad she swore to when she converted to Islam. Intelligent people are willing to chance that she does not.

Michael wrote:The intelligent are arguing that the TSA should look for terrorists instead of going through old ladies' hand bags.

Except terrorists don't run around with signs on their shrits saying look at me I'm a terrorist. A terrorist could be a man or a woman, black white, or arab looking, young or old. I'm sure a lot of terrorists look nice and blend it well. Some terrorists might even have had cancer and or wear prosthetics. That might be the very thing they use to avoid detection. And not all terrorsts are in fact of the muslim variety. Chechen's have a lot of terrorists, Tim Mcveigh was a terrorist, and in fact a lot of envriontmentalsists are terrorists. As are people like Obama's friends in the Minutemen. If you only look for white serial killers, because the majority of them are white middle aged men, you're going to ignore all the serial kilers that don't meet the profile. So profile as but one tool, and not to the exclusion of other equally sensible tools.

Michael wrote:Your retort, of course, is that the grandma COULD be hiding a weapon she would use to further the jihad she swore to when she converted to Islam.

She wouldnt' even necessarily have to convert. She could be forced to board a plane and do a terrorists bidding by force. Or, someone could use her unknowingly, and slip something into her bag or on her person while she's distracted and hope that she gets passed security.But you could also have someone who is a muslim who simply doesn't look stereotypically muslim. And who is a grandmother. The only prerequistite to being a grandmom is that you had a kid and then your kid had a kid. Terrorists can have kids and so can their kids. If you have kids at a young enough age you could even be a grandmom at 40.

R-Vif this was done under the Bush admin you would hear very little outrage from the Right.

A surprising comment. Haven't you noticed a distinct new fissure in the Republican Party (or better put, those right of center) There is a distinctive rise in libertarian sentiment. Those folks aren't particularly enamored of GW either.

I'm frankly surprised lately at those left of center. They seemed to have lost their innate sympathy with "grassroots" sentiment. This isn't a left/right issue at its core. Because its happening under the Obama admin shouldn't push you to be reflexively defensive. Didn't we know this would happen eventually.

And finally, as alluded to above, it seems a prime target now would be the crowd at the security line. Remember the suicide bomber in Iraq who detonated his bomb in the middle of the crowd of applicants OUTSIDE the police compound. A closely clumped crowd is a tempting target.

Israel's interviewing procedures work for them but won't work for us because:

1. The vast majority of passenges into and out of Israel are Jews. Their Jewishness is easily ascertained by some quick test questions. Jews are given brief cursory interviews and then they are on their way.

2. The interviewing of non-Jews is much more intensive and time-consuming, and often includes careful searches of luggage down to the dis-assembly of packed objects. But this type of search is applied to a very small percentage of passengers.

3. Most Israeli flights are long international flights for which a 3 hour check-in-and-be-interviewed-and-searched time is doable. Israel is a small country and people drive rather than fly within it.

3. We can't do what they do because we have a much more diverse population that is much more difficult to accurately profile, and because we are a vast country with many short-hop domestic flights. Imagine a 3 hour check in for a shuttle from Boston or New York to DC.

4. The Israeli interviews, especially those of non-Jews, are a much more intrusive violation of personal liberty than is a scanner.

@lucidYou argue that profiling a la Israel wouldn't work in this country. Even though basic profiling techniques would have stopped the two attempted attacks since 9/11.

A system based on the El Al technique doesn't have to be complicated. Except maybe to people who have no confidence in common sense; and who believe there is a terrorist around every corner.

But I am under no illusion that scan and grope will go away any time soon. The scanners are easy; and most people prefer easy. Plus too much money is "invested" in the scanners. They will likely become ubiquitous.

But let's not pretend that the argument for the scanners are based on them being the best security available. Or that the current system is the best for preserving our privacy.

This is completely about convenience. It's easier to take away our fourth amendment rights than risk insulting the professionally offended. It's easier to force people to walk through a scanner they disapprove of or face humiliation, than risk delaying someone else's flight.

Airline passengers may be the least violent and dangerous groups in the world, at least in regards to the safety of airline passengers. The fact that someone has bought a ticket and gone to board the plane is almost certain proof that they are not a threat to the safety of other passengers. The TSA is a joke.